Using Block Prints in Your Surface Pattern Designs

1. Using Block Prints in your Surface Pattern Designs: I'm Danielle Kinley Ryland, a surface pattern designer and illustrator out of San Diego, California. In today's course, we're going to talk about how to use linocuts in your service pattern designs. A linocut or a block print is the term used to create an illustration on a certain material, most commonly wood or linoleum and carving that illustration out. Essentially what you're doing is creating a stamp just like this dinosaur here that I made for my daughter because she's obsessed. Once you have the stamp, it's really common to use it to print on fabric or paper or wallpaper or really any surface and you can create a pattern by hand. What we're going to do in this course is a little bit different. We're going to make these block prints, digitize them, and then we're going to manipulate them, edit them, and create our patterns in illustrator. What this does is it gives us more freedom as to what it looks like in the end, and it also gives us the ability to upload them to Spoonflower or print on demand sides, or even send them to clients. Let's get started. 2. A Couple of Notes on Block Printing: A little bit about Lino cutting or black printing and how you may be able to use these. In other ways, I've been Lino cutting for a while now and I love it. I love the way it looks. I love doing it. It's really fun. A couple of different ways that I use it. One is they use it to make prints. This draft over here who's stuck in a box. He is a Lino cut that I digitized and made into a print. The Zebra over here, same thing. Zebra's actually my illustration logo that I use on my website and for my illustration work. Then I also use it for my marketing material. When I go to art fairs or makers markets, I just put my stamp on all my packaging. I do that with things that I mail as well. It just adds this extra touch. This is just a brown paper bag. I get so many compliments or comments on how cute my packaging is. It's literally just a stamp on a brown paper bag. This one as well. That stamp looks like this. I just put it on a piece of wood and then just stamp all my marketing material. It takes a lot less time than drawing on your marketing material or spending a bunch of money on marketing material that's really, really expensive. It's just a really nice touch. Those are a couple of ways that I've used it. Then as I just started really enjoying doing it, then I started adding them into my patterns. 3. Supplies You Will Need: Let's talk about supplies. If you're a total beginner, I suggest you go online, and go to an art store or to Amazon, and get this beginner pack. It's from Speedball, and it's like $20. It's going to come with a brayer, it's going to come with black ink, it's going to come with your carving tool, and it's going to come with a block of linoleum block. It's going to have everything that you need to get started. If you don't get that kit, then you can go online and you can get a carving tool. I think this is $12, the Speedball one, and it's nice because it's got all these interchangeable heads that you can store in the butt of it. It's got these little blades and you can just switch them out on the top here. It's really convenient if you want to get the really nice tools, which I wouldn't suggest if you're just trying this out. That'll run you a 100 bucks or more to get a nice set. That's a good place to start with the Speed Ball one. Get yourself a brayer and some block printing ink, it's literally called block printing ink. You can get fabric or you can get ink for paper. What I like to use actually more than the ink, is just an ink pad. So I have this black acid free permanent waterproof ink that you would use for stamps. You're going to need carbon paper. You don't have to have this, but it makes your life a little bit easier. Carbon paper or transfer paper, graphite paper, a pencil, things to draw with. If you're using the brayer, then you're also going to need just a small sheet of glass. I think that's it. 4. Block Printing Basics: Couple of notes on block printing and your supplies before we just jump right in. Once you have your carving tool, it's going to come with three different weights.There is a size one, a size two, and a size five. Your size one is itty bitty and so this is for your detailing. It's a little tiny blade on the end of that. Your size two is a little bit bigger than that, bigger details maybe outlines and your size five is your biggest blade and that's going to be used to scoop away big areas of space. Another note is that if you're doing any words, then you have to do them backward. When I did my logo, I did it backward. I did it forward on my stamp, but what happens when you do it forward on your stamp is that when you put it on paper, it comes out backward. If you write your word backward, like this one says, ''Explore'' down here and I've carved it backward so that when I stamp it on paper, it comes out forward. It's just something to take note of in case your are going to do any typography or anything like that. Luckily, because we're digitizing these, if we do mess it up like I did with my logo, you can just turn it around on illustrator and all is good, but if you want to use it on your branding or if you want to use it for something hand done, it's not going to work. 5. Choosing Your Motif: The first thing you're going to do is decide on motif. If you have a surface pattern, may be a book or a sketchbook where you've got some things in there that you like, I've been wanting to do a pattern with this motif. For that motif, that's a good place to start. I'm going to keep it really simple. Not something with so much detail, not something super extravagant. I do some plants and a cut, I decided I'm going to do three different motifs. I cut out decently small blocks of Nano [inaudible] block. I've got, they're all four by six inches and when I draw my motif, I'm transforming motifs onto here. I'm going to try to fill up the whole block, or close to it. [inaudible] So that all I'm going to say are kind of the same size. To start with, I can either draw directly onto my book. I would do that with pencil, some people like to go over that with sharpie. So that as you are carving, your hand isn't erasing it as you go because it'll fade over time. I'm not doing anything so detailed where I think that's going to be an issue, so I just do it in pencil. That's my favorite way to do it is just draw directly on the block, draw me sketchbook, get a good idea, and then draw directly on the block. Another way to do that is to use your carbon paper. I'll show you that now. 6. Sketching and Transfering Your Motifs: Now I have my sketches and I'm just going to go ahead and outline them, make them a little bit darker so that I can see them better and that I know what it is that I want to end up on my final linocut. Something you'll notice is that I put little corners here and all I did was trace the corners of my linocut block so that I knew that whatever I drew here had to fit onto this block. The beauty about this part is that nothing has to be perfect, this is something that we're going to trace and then we're going to carve so our sketches don't have to be exactly how we want it to be. I also really enjoy when these are a little bit wonky because it just makes them have that much more character. This one now What you'll notice is that my lines are all over the place and not very exact or precise. When I'm doing my initial sketch, I just don't worry about how it looks because I still have to trace it over again and wish I could be more careful and I still have to carve and that's when I'm going to be the most careful. Now that we're done drawing these motifs, we are going to need our lino block here. We're going to need a carbon paper, I cut out a piece, you don't have to be careful about it, but a piece that's going to fit right on top. When you put it on top you're going to put the darker side down so that you get a good transfer. I like to take this into place so that it doesn't move around allow me and then make sure it's really flat. I'm going to take just one side so that as I'm going, I can look and make sure that I'm getting the transfer that I want. I'm going to put this under our paper and because the carbon paper is so dark, I can see it through and it can line it up with my corners. Now, I drew this a little bit off center, so I'm actually going to even move my block up a little bit so that my plant is just a tiny bit more center. That's okay. We can make adjustments as we go. Then I'm going to go through and I am going to trace over it again. I find that you have to press pretty hard and it's nice to just scratch your away through, not just like one even line so we'll just look and make sure that this little piece that we're doing now transfers through. You want to check before you trace the whole thing and it doesn't come through. You can see the line coming through. I might even press a little bit harder so that I can really see it but it is working. A lot of times these types of details, I'll just draw directly on the block later because I don't really need to waste time sketching them or drawing them in now. This is time too where you can fix some of the wonky lines or whatever. Here's our plant. It's all there, it's all come through. If you don't like how light or faint it is, you can always draw directly on the block. You don't have to, you can go with those pencil lines or those graphite lines. But you can do whatever you want because once you start carving and using ink, it's really not going to matter. There's one of our blocks. That's one way to transfer. The other way, which is the way that I use most often, is just to draw directly on your block. This sketch, I didn't measure out so it's not going to fit on any block. Usually what I do, especially with sketches that just aren't really that complex or hard to duplicate, I just like to sketch directly on the block, so that's what I'll do at this plant. Here's my second sketch. Now I have two potted plants and now I will show you my cats. Here I have cats. I decided to do two of them, one with a tail that loops around and its asleep, and the other one with a tail that goes up and is awake. They're really simple. But I think they're going to be cute. I prepared another carbon block. I used actually the same carbon paper. If you use it too much, eventually it'll lose its graphite, but we didn't draw on it very much, so it should be okay. I'm going to line that up. We're actually going to move this over a little bit and I'm going to trace this one first. The reason I have this one dark and not this one is that I want them to be the same shape so I'm going to use this as my model bowl times where we draw it here, I'm going to move the block over and then trace it again here. Let's check that up. We can see that she's pretty faint, it's okay. Since she's so thin, I'm going to copy over her right now so that I don't lose her. Great. We're going to put that carbon paper back on, tape it down, move it over and then we're going to copy it again, but we're going to make it into this ca. She's there. Now I'll use my pencil on this one. I'm just going to make her darker and I'm going to add her tail. I'm just free handing that and if I mess it up, I can always just draw over it, it's no big deal. Her eyes, so you'll see right here the whisker is getting in the way, I can shift where that goes and redraw it in a different way if I want. 7. Carving Your Blocks: Now that we have our blocks all sketched out, we're going to start in the fun part and we're going to start carving. The first thing I want to show you and talk to you about is how to load up your carving tool. If you have this feeble tool, you're going to have these three blades where he talked about them. They're all different sizes. Each one of these blades is going to have this rounded edge here and then a sharp edge on the other side. We're going to take one of those. It doesn't matter which one, maybe the five, the biggest one to start with. We're going to loosen the top of our tool by turning to the left. Slow lefty, loose, and then you're going to stick the rounded part in-between this ball in the middle and the smaller metal piece and just stick it right in. Then you're going to turn to the right to already tight it up. Now it's in and it's solid and it's going to be to carve. We can pick any of these blocks and start with the kitty. The first thing I'm going to do with a cat is decide, do I want this cat to be black or color whatever ink my color is? Or do I want it to be white or clear or transparent? Do I just want it to be an outline or do I want it to be filled? I think I want the cat to be black because black cats are super cool. In order for me to get a black cat, I'm going to need to get rid of everything out here and keep the middle in. What I'm going to start by doing is curving the outline. Now if there's any part of your sketch that you don't like, that looks a little bit wonky too, now is a good time to just go in and clean it up and make sure that you're carving exactly what it is that you want it to look like. I don't like that. The sides don't necessarily match very well. We're going to make sure that this little kitty is ready to go. Cool. I think to make this nose a little bit lower. The beauty of this and how ugly it looks is that once you carve it, you won't see any of that. Now I'm going to go ahead and attack the outline. I'm just going to scoop right along the outside, carve of that outline and try to make it as smooth as possible. The more you start and stop, the more little jagged pieces you're going to get. But the beauty of line up cut, is that even the jagged pieces look really cool. You can't mess it up. Now this area is a little bit thin. I think I'm okay to use this tool here. But sometimes if details are a little bit too tight, that's when you want to grab a new blade and be a little bit more detailed with it. Luckily, this particular block is really simple and we don't have to do too much detail work. I'm going to go from this side. I want to make the longest, most continuous cuts that I can. You'll notice I'm also moving the block to help make this a little bit smoother for me. Here we go. Now we have this super cute outline. If I feel like I have too much extra space around it, I can also go in and cut and trim and do all that. Now I want a little bit because I want there to be some marks on the outside of it, some detail. But if I just go ahead and cut a little bit of the access, it just helps give me a little bit less work to do. Another thing to look out for is how deep you go in with your carving tool. The deeper you go, to an extent, the better stamp you're going to get. Now if you go too deep and you get your blade buried here and you'll see it's underneath there. Then when you pull it up, the block is going to rip. If you're doing that over here where you're trying to make some nice detail, it's going to make some really ugly edges. You just want to make sure that when you're cutting, that you're not getting that edge stuck underneath the block, that it's staying above the black as you move it through. I'm going to go ahead and just finish going through this outline before we get to the middle and start doing the details. I'd like to start with the outline because it just gives me a good place to start. You get rid of a lot of the block really early makes you feel really accomplished. Something else you'll notice is that I'm not going out this way with my strokes, I'm following the same stroke. That following the outline and following your original stroke, it's going to give you the best looking extra lines. These little lines are going to pick up a little bit at the ink and you're going to get these cool little lines around your subject. That's what kind of makes your motif look like a line of cut, and that's how you can tell it's a line of cut. It's really pretty and it's unique, and it's a cool look. You want to make sure that you're conscious of the type of lines that you're making on the outline when you're just getting rid of this stuff because they're almost important as the detail work in the middle. So now that we have our outline done, we're going to do the details in the middle. I've got this number two, which is a good detailer for things that are maybe a little bit bigger, maybe it would be okay for the legs and then I've got this one that would be good for the nose and the whiskers for the smaller details. So we're going to go ahead and put in the two, and we are going to cut out her legs. So once again when I'm cutting something round, I tend to like to use, moving the block instead of moving my tool. Now that we have those legs, we're going to put in our smallest detailer, the one, and we're going to cut out her whiskers and her nose, and her eyes. So what I like to do right after I curve a block is test it and make sure that there's no something weird and funky that I didn't notice. So I'm just going to grab my ink pad, it's just faster to use this than to use the block printing ink, and so I'm going to get it nice and black. The first time usually it's really splotchy because it needs to kind of get primed up. That's okay, we're going to put a test paper here and see what she looks like. Peel her up and she's pretty cute. I see just little tiny details that can be kind of smoothed out but this is a good way to kind of check. Now, also keep in mind that it does not have to be perfect. Sometimes as illustrators, we like to make sure that everything has perfect lines and all that. Block printing is not perfect, that's what kind of makes it special and what makes it distinct and what makes it recognizable. If this gets too perfect, then we don't see the line of cut in it anymore. These little tiny jagged spots are what makes it pretty cool. Fix it but don't get too carried away. I'm going to go ahead and now and continue cutting out the rest of my blocks. Now that we have our prints, it's time to make really nice copies and then digitize them so that we can make our service pattern design. 8. Inking and Printing Your Linocuts : Now we're going to go ahead and ink our motifs. So whether you have one motif, which would be fine to create a pattern with, or whether you have multiple like I do, that's fine as well. So we're going to grab a white piece of paper, this is one I took out of my sketchbook. It doesn't really matter as long as it's white, it does have lines on it and it's easy to scan, and then we're going to do this two different ways and compare and see what we like better. We're going to use this ink pad for the first one, and we're going to use this block printing ink for the second one. So to start with, we're going to press all around on our block print, and I lift it up, check it out, make sure that the ink is evenly coated, and do just a little bit more for good measure. We want to press down all the sides so that we're also getting ink in the crevasses here. See how all those lines have ink on it too, because that's going to give us some fun stuff to play with once we digitize. So I'm going to be really careful when I press it down not to move it or shake or get weird lines. Then I'm going to press down on all parts of my black print so that I get a really nice even print as I lift up. I've got this really cool little black cat, just looks little sassy. Go on to the next one. Sometimes people, I'll show you on this one. So I'm going to do the same thing. I'm going to press down everywhere, you get lots of ink. Everywhere, I can get it, when it's pink still, and you haven't done this yet, you'll have to do this more. But once you have done a couple of prints, usually your prints get better and better and better because the ink coverage gets better. So she looks pretty good, and we're going to place her down here, and do the same thing. Some people will use the roller, smash it down really good, I think I just met and moved it. But I find that pressing down is good enough. I moved it a little bit so it's a little fuzzy, so I'll do that one again later, now I'm going to do one of my plants. See if I've got good coverage there, little few spots still. I'm going to print this one's sideways, so I remove from my other one. I'm going to put it down on one side, and then lay it down on the other. The bigger the stamp is, the easier it is to get a little bit fuzzy or move it around on accident. So laying it down on one side first makes it a little bit easier, and then pulling it up one side to the other makes it easier to not to mess it up here. So what you'll notice with this stamp pad is that you get a lot of graininess, which you either like or you don't like, and you can decide if you like that or not. I tend to think it looks really cool, just adds a little bit more texture, and we're getting some really cool fun lines here too. So this our last motif, need more coverage, and that looks good. We're going to put her or him right here. Then make sure that we're pressing down evenly everywhere. So then I can decide because I can do this over and over and over again. Do I like that it's missing that much black or this one that's all fuzzy. I'm obviously going to do it again. Then I can just keep doing it until I get the motifs that I want, and decide that I want to digitize and use for my pattern. So this is the first way to do it with ink pad. I have a fresh piece of paper to do with our speedball ink. So I'm going to grab a piece of glass. This is just glass that was in an old frame. I'm going to put a generous amount of ink right on that frame. Then I'm going to use my breyer, and I'm going to mix that around. So this is water-based thing, which I like to work with, doesn't smell as bad and it's so much easier to clean up, then an oil-based ink, but they have both. So I'm going to move this around, move this around and until I get a really nice coat on my breath. Because I'm going to use my breyer to quote my stamps. So we're going to get a nice even coat on my stamps, and make sure you've got really good coverage, and then I'm going to do the same thing I did before. Lay it down on my paper, press down really good, good even pressure all around the stamp. What you'll notice, about the ink is that there comes in the tube, is that you get a lot better coverage. You still get these really cool lines, but it's not as sparse. So if we're going to do a side-by-side comparison here between the two, often with the server. A side-by-side comparison between the two, this obviously isn't as deep of a color. I prefer this method, one, it's not as messy, and it's less clean out. But unless prep, but I like this texture, and once I take it into Illustrator, I'm going to image trace it. I'm going to turn it black anyway, so it's still going to be this deep black color, but it's just going to have a little bit more texture. Then this one's going to have, so it's really up to you what you like better. I think that using the breyer method on fabric, and if you're printing by hand, works really well better than the impact does. But I think that if you're using it to digitize it, that you pad works better. So it's really up to you. So same thing, and you'll get the hang of this two, sometimes you can put too much in the cone, and it's going to just splat everywhere. You just want a nice even coat. The more detail you have, the more important it is to get the hang of it. I think I might have moved on. I peel this up. So like this, I lost some detail in the eye and in the whiskers, and that's because I just put on too thick of a quote. Another trick with this is that when you put this on your breyer, you're going to do it enough where you start to hear a stickiness happen. It's going to just make this almost like velcro noise, and I'm not even there yet because I have a lot of water in here because I didn't shake it up really good. There you go, now you construct here. So there's this like velcro sound that's going to make this not so thick so that you don't lose detail. So if you start finding that you're using this method, use less ink, and make sure that you get that Velcro noise before you put it on your income, or else you're just going to lose some of the details, it's going to be too thick. So mess around with that, pick whatever method you like better, and get however many motifs you have, get a print of each of those that you just really like, and meet me back, and we will digitize. 9. Digitizing and Editing Your Motifs: The next thing we're going to talk about is how to digitize and image trace your motifs, and so the first thing you're going to want to do, is get your motifs into your computer. So there's a couple ways to do that; one is scanning, and the other one is taking a picture either with your phone, or with a camera and then uploading them that way. I like scanning my documents, and so I'm going to go ahead and do that now and show you how to do that. Everyone's scanners are a little bit different, but with something like this that we're going to image trace and it's a black and white picture, and it's not watercolor or something where we really are worried about losing quality. We can go ahead and do a general purpose scan here, we don't have to go up to 600 BPI or anything like that. What we get with general purpose will be just fine. So here's our document, we've got all our motifs on here, I like the way they look, I've got some good texture still and we don't lose too much quality. I'm going to go ahead and send that, and make a document. We'll call them linocut motifs, and save them. Now those are saved on my computer as a document, and then I'm going to go ahead and go into illustrator, and I'm going to create a new document. We'll just go with the simple basic square document, I'm going to go ahead and do 1,000 by 1,000 pixels, so that's going to be a nice square, and that is perfect. So create, and I've got my box. Now, I'm going to bring in my document that has my motifs on it, and you might have a couple of different documents if you stamp them on different paper, that's okay too. I'm going to go to file and place, it's going to bring up my documents, I'm going to open that up, and then I'm going to click wherever I want to put. It, doesn't really matter. Before it Image trace this, I'm going to crop it just so it has less to have to image trace, and I can cut out things that I don't want. I'm going to press Enter, and it's going to go ahead and crop that for me. So here's my document that I want to image trace. I've got a couple different options here, I can image trace up here, I can image trace right here, this little circular, I guess icon is for image tracing, so I'm going to click on that, it's going to bring out this tab for me, and I'm going to press down on advanced, so that I have a couple more options and a little bit more control. Under preset, I'm going to go ahead and do black and white logo, and that's going to work its magic for me, and then I'm also going to click on ignore white, so that we don't have a background. Then that gives me these motifs that are black, but they still have some graininess to them, some details to them. Now, I can mess with that graininess, if I feel like it's too grainy, I can move it up, and that will fill in some of the white for me. I can just keep messing with that, until I get my motifs looking exactly like I want them. I think that looks pretty cool. I like a little bit of the graininess in the plants, and I don't mind the cats are pretty solid. I think that looks good, so I'm going to press this area to get rid of that, and then I'm going to go up here, and I'm going to click expand. What that's going to do is turn these into vectors for me. So right now, all of this is grouped together, so I'm going to go to object ungroup, and then I'm going to start editing away. One of the things I want to do, is just get rid of any of these straight lines. There's this black line here that I don't want, once I get rid of and I'm just going to go through and group certain things together, like this is all should be part of one group, and I'm not going to group it altogether yet, because I still want to go in and edit. Any lines that are just too much, I don't really like the way they look, I'm going to go in and delete them, I'm going to move some of these lines around. This is what's so beautiful about Illustrator is that, whatever you got in your scan, you have control over, and can still manipulate and mess with them and make look the way that you want it to look. I can even like, let's say I want to get a cool line in here, and I can do that as well and just get whatever look that I want to get, I can create. I'll mess with that a little bit too, and then same thing here. Group it all together a little bit. When I turn this to make this turn and stay perfectly straight, I'm just going to hold down the Shift key as I do it. Those not smart. So obviously this isn't all grouped, so I don't want to put it too close to anything else where it might get muddled up. Same thing here, I'm going to move this away, and then just chip away and editing it and making it look the way I want it to look. I'm going to go through and do that really quickly and you go ahead and do that to yours as well. Once you've added your motifs in a way where you really like the way the little stray marks look that make it really stand out as a line of code. Once you get those arranged in a way that you like, and there's no rules here, you can have them as thick as you want, you can move a line from one side to another side of your motif, and just play around until you get something that you like the way it looks. So once you do and you like the way it looks, go ahead and highlight the whole thing and go up to objects and group. I already did this to of mine, but just make sure you do that because it's a bummer when you try to grab it, and there's all these little pieces, and it gets separated because then it's hard to put back together again sometimes. 10. Making a Pattern with a Single Motif: Now that we have our motifs grouped together, their image traced, they're ready to go, they're ready to make a pattern. We're going to talk about a couple different ways we can go after this. I'm going to pick my favorite motif and I think it's this plant right here. I think it's pretty cool. I'm going to use that to start with, to show you how to make a pattern with just one motif. I'm going to go over here to my toolbar and grab the rectangle tool. I'm going to click right in the corner, and I'm going to create 1,000 by 1,000 pixels square. That's going to cover my Artboard. If you remember, that's the Artboard we started with. Now if you have a 400 by 400 pixel Artboard, then you're going to make a square that's 400 by 400 pixels or whatever you're Artboard size is. It doesn't have to be a perfect square, but it's easier for what we're doing right now. Let's just go with a really light gray. We're going to get this really basic because color can make things just a little bit more complicated. I'm going to grab my motif, and I'm going to put it in the upper left-hand corner. I'm going to go to object arrange, bring to front so that it's in the front, and I'm going to mess with the size. I'm going to hold down Shift and I'm going to make my motif bigger, and we're just going to make a really, really simple pattern here. The reason I hold down shift is so that I don't change the proportions of my motif. I'm going to move these out of the way a little bit. I'm going to click on my motif here. I'm going to click on Control and then click Transform and move. I'm going to move my plant horizontal 1,000 pixels by zero, and I'm going to click on copy because previews on it shows me where it's going to move to. If I press "Okay" it's going to move the whole thing without copying it, but I want to make a copy, so let me click on copy. Now I have two plants, one in each corner, and they're exactly 1,000 pixels away from each other. I'm going to click on my plant, hold down shift, click on my other plant control, click Transform, move, and now they're going to go horizontal zero pixels and vertical 1,000 pixels copy. This is probably review for a lot of people, but I want to make sure that I'm not just skipping over things that are important. I'm going to click on that original motif again, and I'm going to Control click Transform, move, and I'm going to move horizontal 500 pixels vertical, 500 horizontal, 500 vertical, and put copy. That's going to put it directly in the middle of all the other motifs. Now I'm also going to rotate my plant so that it's upside down. I'm going to go over here and I'm going to click on the rotate tool, and I'm going to hold shift as a turn it around exactly upside down. What that does is just gives me multiple directions with my motifs. That way, when this becomes a pattern, if this were to be put on fabric, it can be sown and a bunch of different ways and it won't look upside down anyway. If I had all the plants facing the same way, there's definitely a right-side up and definitely an upside down and so here there really isn't that. If that was way too fast and you have no idea how to do this, I would suggest you go back and check out some of the really amazing service pattern tutorials on sculpture. There's a lot of them and they're really, really good. If that was just really fascinating, you've no idea what I'm talking about, then go check those out because there's some tutorials that are amazing. Now you're going click on this background box, Command C for copy and Command B, and that's going to copy that in the back of that square that's in front, and now my back squares highlighted right now. I'm going to go over here and I'm going to take away the fill. That square in the back has no fill, no border. It's just a clear box. That's how I'm going to be able to make this into repeat. I'm going to highlight the whole thing, all my motifs, MI square I'm going to drag it and drop it into my swatches panel. I just made a really simple pattern and the way I'm going to be able to test this. I'm going to draw a rectangle over here, and I'm going to click on that swatch, and now I have this super q would align a cut pattern. Very, very easy to make. Super simple. I'm going to click on it, hit Control, transform scale, and I'm going to go, let's go like 50 percent. I'm going to unclick transform objects and my previews on someone to see what it looks like, and I'm just going to hit Okay. This is just going to show me what this pattern looks like on a bigger scale. Let's say if it was sheets or a t-shirt pattern or wallpaper or something like that. I would have a better idea as to what it would look like in a smaller scale. That's the first tutorial. If you only made one motif or maybe there's one motif that you just like better than the others and you just want to make a really simple line to cut pattern. This is a really good way to do that. 11. Making a Tossed Pattern with Multiple Motifs: Now that we've created a pattern with one motif, we're going to get a little bit more complicated and do a pattern with multiple motifs. So I have four, whether you have two or four, or five or ten, you can really do this with any amount. The more motifs you have, the more complex this can get, and so let's get to it. So the first thing I'm going do, is select all of my motifs and I'm going to Command C, Command V, and I'm going to copy and paste them. So I've got them all grabbed, now I'm going to rotate them around while holding shift, so they click into the place exactly upside down. What this does for me is reminds me that I need to incorporate motifs that are also upside down. If I'm doing a toss pattern, it's really good to have it be able to be used in any direction. You can do it all in the same direction, but this just gives it a little bit more versatility. So I'm also going to copy and paste the whole group again, and I'm going to go to Reflect tool and I'm going to turn it exactly sideways. So now you'll notice that my kitty's tails are going opposite directions and these have just been turned around. So this just gives us even more dynamic in our pattern. So we've got a good place to start. Now, the smaller you make your motifs on your upward, the more complex and the harder it's going to be to find the repeat. Sp you can do them as big as you want, but if you wanted to be a little bit more difficult to find the repeat, then you're going to make them a little bit smaller and you're going to have more motifs in your space, in your upward. To start with, you're just going to go for it and you're going to try to arrange these in a way that looks nice and you're going to fill out this top row and this side row. Then once you kind of have that filled in and a little bit of the middle filled in, then we're going to check back in. So now that we have this whole row filled in and this whole row filled in, we're going to go ahead and copy and paste this row. I'm sorry, we're going to copy this row onto this side and we're going to copy this row down at the bottom, like we did with the single motif, it's just more motifs to work with. Just so you know as well, my background, I went ahead and I locked it so that I didn't have to worry about it moving as I moved motifs around. I think I forgot to mention that. So that's always helpful when you lock your background or you can put it on a different layer and lock it as well. So I'm going to highlight all these Control-Click, transform, move, and I'm going to move those 1,000 pixels horizontal, 0 vertical and I'm going to click Copy. That's going to put this same row that's here over on this side and I'm going to do the same thing at the top. I'm going to copy Control-Click, transform, move, 0 horizontal, 1000 vertical, and copy. So what you'll notice is that it copied and it filled in some spaces, but I also have some strange spacing happening. That's going to happen, if you get it perfect the first time you are incredible. It's just hasn't happened. So this is funny spacing and so I can move that cat and see if I like that better, and these are a little bit close and then there's this gap here. So go ahead and just fix all those weird little gaps, but take note that when you do, like if I were to move this to here because it looks better spacing wise and I didn't move this on the same amount. Then either I'm going to go ahead and delete this one up here and then copy this one and move it back to the same spot where I have to move them together. Because if I try a repeat and these are not identical on their line on the box, the repeats can be really funky. So I'm going to go ahead and delete that one and control-click transform, move, and because I'm moving it up to the top, it's going to be 0 horizontal and it's going to be negative 1000 vertical. You have to use negative to go up and you have to use negative to go across to the left. Then that's going to make this facing funny and so I'm going to just kind of finagle things around and move things around until they fit, and you do the same and I'll meet you back here once we get something we're happy with. So I think this looks pretty good, it's nicely spaced. We've got a good mixture of different motifs and some are upside down and some are upside up and it's good mix. What I'm going do now is go to object, unlock all, and that's going to unlock my background squares and if you remember, I have a transparent square behind this background square, that's going to help me make this repeat. I'm going to grab all of this and I'm going to drag it and drop it into this watches panel. Then I'm going move over here, make a rectangle and then I'm going to click on my swatch. So now I can see my pattern. I'm going to do the same thing here where I mess with this scale and I make that scale smaller, unclick, transform objects. Then you're going to really be able to see what it looks like at about 50 percent. So this is at a smaller scale further away, and what you'll notice is that you'll start to see just random lines happening like there's some almost like waves going through this that you wouldn't see at the bigger scale. What you can also look for is anywhere that you see spacing that's really uneven, or maybe too many motifs that are pointing upward in a row and too many that are facing down in a row, and things like that. So you can just really investigate at this level and tweak it until you get something that you really like. 12. Coloring and Recoloring Your Pattern: Now the last thing we're going to do in this course is recolor our pattern. We have probably the most basic colors you can have with black and gray, and while it looks okay, we can really make this pattern pop and really pretty with adding some color. I really like to build my pattern out, get a layout that I really like, make sure the icons are arranged the way that I want them, and not have to worry about color until the end. Illustrator's, Recolor Artwork tool makes that a really easy way to approach making patterns and coloring patterns. The first thing that we're going to do is create a box. Then in that box we're going to fill it with our pattern. We can use either pattern that we want, but I'm going to go with the more complex one for now. Once we have that box selected, we're going to go up to this tool up here, it's the Recolor Artwork tool, and we are going to mess with recoloring our pattern. Right now because this is black, it doesn't have a color next to it and so I'm going to click and I'm going to say "Yes" that I want to add a new color to the current harmony. That's going to allow me to change that black color. I have a couple of different color groups here. If you don't know how to make color groups or add palettes into your color library, I would suggest going back to those surface pattern, classes on Skillshare that teach you all the basics and everything that you need to know about making surface patterns. Because there's a lot of ways to do it and it's really nice to have your own palettes. If you don't have your own palette, you can always use the palette that's built in and the colors that are built into Illustrator and that's fine too, to mess around with. We'll start with this palette. I've got orange and green. It randomly selects to the colors out of that palette, and I don't like that at all. What I'm going to do is change it by using this button right here that says "Randomly Change Color Order". What that's going to do is, it's going to give me a new color combination. I'll just keep clicking through until I find something that I like. What you'll notice is that the ones with the most contrast tend to be the ones that look the best. This one probably looks the best out of what we've seen so far, and it's because there's a high contrast between the background and the foreground. This one as well. Then we can click on this palette and click around until we find something that we like. Obviously, when there's very little contrast it almost hurts your eyes. You can't even see the motifs and that's not going to work. You can go through and just see what you like, and it's interesting too, how some colors will create this really soft, beautiful pattern and some colors will create something that's a little bit harder. Depending on what look you're going for, color is a tremendous tool. Let's say we love that, so we're going to say, okay, I'm not going to save my changes to my swatch group. Now this is a new color or a new pattern, and you'll see that it's created this color pattern here, and I still have my old one. If I want to pull the original pattern out, I can drag this here and it's going to have my original pattern, like the one I made over here, but now with the different colors. That's a really good thing to know. When you first do that, it's going to have all these grouped together, so you can go ahead and Ungroup and edit if you want to. I'm going to go ahead and delete that, and I'm going to go back to my original. Now if I want to recolor all the cats, or all the plants, or have more than just those two colors, I'm going to have to go in to my original and change a color. Let's say I want all the plants to be another color. I'm just going to hold Shift down and select all of my plants. I'm going to pick a random color because it doesn't matter right now. Then I'm going to select the whole thing, make another pattern, and then click on this box, fill that box with that new pattern. Is this locked? This must be locked. Yeah, so Object, Unlock. Because my background is locked, my background has now disappeared. Objects, Unlock All, and let's try that again. I'm going to select the whole thing, and slide it on into the swatches panel, and then there we go. Now we have our pattern again. This is also going to create a whole different look and a whole different pattern. It might create lines that you don't like, so when you recolor, you're also going to want to check out the scale to see if you still like the pattern that it's created. We'll just cancel that and we'll go ahead and recolor. I'm going to go up here to the Recolor Artwork tool. I'm going to make black part of my color harmony, and then let's go with this one. Now we've got three different colors, which is pretty cool. Let's go with this one, sure like that, that's cute. Let's say that I really like this palette, but I really don't like that the background's red and let's say I want the cats to be red. I'm going to just drag this red and switch it with the white and then I can change where those colors land. Let's find something that we like. Sometimes you'll find too, that a palette that you chose just doesn't really work with the pattern, and doesn't turn out the way that you had hoped it would, and so you can just use a different palette and change it up. Let's say you like this but you want that greenish background and maybe you're like, I don't really think I like those orange cats. So if I double click on that orange, and I go to my Color Swatches, I can scroll down. This is my rainbow palette here, and my grays and the swatches that Illustrator gives me, they're all in there. Let's say I want those cats to be light blue. Yeah, that's fine. I'm going to click Okay, and it's going to change those cats, light blue forming. Let's say I really like that, I'm going to click Okay. That's now put my new pattern that's colored into my Swatches panel. You can mess around with that, find a palette that you really like, a color combination that you really like, and you could make this into four different colors. You could make all of these potted plants one color, and all of these cats one color or whatever, you can get crazy with it if you want. Once you have your final pattern, and you've got it colored and you're happy with it, then go ahead and post that to the project section. I would love to see what you guys come up with. I'd also love if you post a picture of your original lineup cuts or of them stamped on your paper, so we can see your original motifs and then how you manipulated them into your pattern into Illustrator. 13. Conclusion: Well, that's it for this course. I hope you had fun, I hope you learned a lot. Whatever your finished motifs were and that finished surface pattern, go ahead and post that to the project section down below. Any questions you might have along the way, go ahead and post those in the discussions tab, and I'll be checking in soon. Thank you so much for taking the class and I'll see you next time.